Who Should Tell the Global Warming Story?
February 2008
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Salon.com recently reported that of all the 2,975 questions major media outlets have asked the presidential candidates this election season, only six contained the words “global warming” or “climate change.” That’s pretty insignificant, considering that there were at least three questions about UFOs.
Some of the country’s top journalists came to Stanford on January 29 to discuss why this environmental crisis was still not making more headlines, even now that scientists agree that the earth’s temperature is rising to dangerous levels. Panelists including Felicity Barringer, New York Times national correspondent covering the environment, argued that it was readers and not newspapers who decided what constituted news. She said the Times found it challenging to sell the public on global warming stories because so much of the country was still not feeling the effect of a warmer world.
“The immediate impact of global warming is being felt in a very dispersed way,” Barringer said. “In Alaska, you have villages falling into the ocean, but the average soccer mom is not seeing anything compelling her to trade in her car for a more fuel-efficient model.”
Still, Barringer confessed she was baffled over why immigration, another issue that did not significantly impact the average American, was receiving so much more attention than global warming. “That’s a complete mystery to me,” she said.
The event was organized by the MBA student Environmentally Sustainable Business Club at the Graduate School of Business, Environmental Entrepreneurs, and the National Resources Defense Council, and underwritten in part by a gift from David and Heidi Welch, MBA ’90.
At the core of this focus on the media was a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council asserting that the United States could achieve a whopping 80 percent reduction in the pollution that contributes to global warming by the year 2050, without requiring Americans to give up their notoriously consumer ways.
“The study assumes that people will continue to live in their McMansions and buy big cars, which they will drive longer and longer distances,” said Rick Duke, director of the NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation.
If that sounds too good to be true, there is a catch. Duke said the United States would have to invest more than $3 trillion in a range of energy-efficient technologies from cleaner building materials to solar power, and pass new legislation requiring things like fuel-efficient light bulbs or a federal cap on auto emissions. Such measures, Duke said, would be more effective than mere changes in behavior: Building big houses with clean materials would work better than building smaller houses with materials that are harmful to the environment. But such a massive investment would require the support of the general public and of lawmakers, all well educated about the urgent need to reverse global warming.
During an afternoon presentation to the Business School, and at the media panel, the NRDC’s Duke called on the press to help provide that education. He criticized the press for helping to fan the debate over whether global warming was a real problem long after there was sufficient science to put that debate to rest.
“I think what we most need at this juncture is for the media to be sufficiently informed to mediate the discussion intelligently,” Duke said, noting that the country had wasted a lot of time arguing about the science of global warming.
Indeed, the former Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Waldman, another panel participant, admitted that journalists tended to be overwhelmed by science. “As journalists we are trained to do a lot of ‘he said/she said,’” he explained.
Waldman, who now writes for the monthly business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio, said that while he was at the Journal, reporters were encouraged to find stories challenging the theory of global warming. He said that practice did not reflect an order from management, but simply the contrarian nature of newspaper reporting.
While admitting the press was partly to blame for prolonging the debate over global warming, the panelists resisted Duke’s assertion that they could simply take a party line going forward. Even now that global warming is considered a fact there are many different ideas about the role of government, business, and plain old individual responsibility in healing the environment. Most of the panelists also resisted Duke’s assertion that a cleaner environment could be achieved in a country packed with big houses and Hummers.
In a hypothetical question posed to Duke, Barringer explained the dilemma this way: “Let’s say you want the U.S. to adopt an emissions cap and trade program. Is it wrong for a journalist to report that program was tried in England and that it didn’t end up helping the environment?”
Journalists, Barringer explained, “try not to campaign for one thing or another.”
Also on the panel was Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online site for environmental news and policy, which has reached an audience of close to one million largely by injecting humor into a topic that is too often shrouded in gloom and doom.
In a media environment driven by celebrity and comedy plus tangible events like terrorist attacks, slow melting glaciers faced a steep uphill battle to make the nightly news, Giller said.
“Environmental stories tend not to break overnight. They tend to ooze over time,” said Giller. He joked that readers will sometimes shrug off even the biggest environmental stories, thinking, “But didn’t that ice shelf break off last week?”
Of course that inability to grasp what is happening to the planet is due partly to the sheer magnitude of the problem. “Readers and writers are just overwhelmed by the Chicken Little aspect of all of this,” said Waldman.
Along with humor, another solution that has worked well at Grist.org is to feed readers bite-sized morsels of news they can digest rather than massive platters that will leave them feeling depressed and hopeless.
“We’ve interviewed most of the presidential candidates, but that’s not really what brings readers in,” said Giller. He said many more people were interested to know whether you could recycle a beer bottle with a lime wedge stuck inside. (You can.)
Poetry can work too, said Giller, who recited a devastating yet funny haiku that was well received by Grist readers:
A frog in water
Doesn’t feel it boil in time
Dude, we are that frog.
-Andrea Orr